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New Baystate Medical Center children's emergency room in Springfield built to a kid's-eye view

Ann Maynard, director of Emergency Services at Baystate Medical Center, gives a tour of one of the rooms at the Sadowsky Family Pediatric Emergency Department that was unveiled during a ceremony Thursday at Baystate Children's Hospital.
(Photo by Mark M. Murray, The Republican)

"No parent or grandparent ever wants to come here, but I'm sure everyone is happy that this facility is here," said James P. Sadowsky, a member of Baystate's Board of Trustees.

The Sadowsky family has owned and operated Williams Distributing Corp. in Chicopee for 62 years, he said. The family has also sponsored the Sadowsky Center for Children at Baystate's D'Amour Center for Cancer Care.

Sadowsky spoke glowingly Thursday of touring the new children's emergency room with its Disney-designed decor of cartoon characters and warm, inviting colors.

"There is just a wow factor," he said.

Dr. Lindsey K. Grossman, chair of pediatrics at Baystate Children's Hospital, pointed out that even the nurses stations have a dose of whimsy.

"This counter top? Why does it have to brown?," she said. "Why can't it be big and green and shaped like a plant."

She switched on the brightly colored lights that dance on the ceiling of the X-ray room.

"It's the same high-quality X-ray that we use for adults," Grossman said. "But all that kid will remember is 'Wow, there were neat lights in there. That was cool.' "

James Sadowsky speaks on behalf of his family as the Sadowsky Family Pediatric Emergency Department was unveiled during a ceremony Thursday at Baystate Children's Hospital. Mark M. Murray | The Republican

The room is set up so parents and children wait separately from the grownup emergency room with all its disturbing sights of injured or ill grownups

"I've found it's the parents who are more scared than the kids," Grossman said. "They are worried because something has happened to their kid. But everything about this place says it is a place that understands kids. That is reassuring."

Being child-centered translates down to kid-sized commodes in the restrooms and child-sized wheelchairs.

"If a child has to be wheeled someplace, why should they be in a a big huge wheelchair?" Grossman said.

The new emergency rooms, both for adults and children, will total 73,000 square feet compared with the old 17,000-square-foot facility that sees 110,000 patients a year, making it the second-busiest hospital emergency room in the state and third-busiest in New England.

The children's emergency room now gets 18,000 patients a year, making it by itself busier than the whole of Baystate Mary Lane in Ware, said Dr. Niels Rathlev, Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine.

The new emergency rooms are part of the $296 million MassMutual Wing, a 640,000-square-foot-expansion that's been under construction for four years. Long-term plans call for building a new children's hospital in some of the yet-unfinished space. The MassMutual Wing already houses the Davis Family Heart & Vascular Center that opened in March.